We know that WFME-FM is going from Harold Camping’s Family Stations to Cumulus Media, adding a full-market FM to the two stations Cumulus already has in the market. But as yet, no price has been announced.
The station is a Class B on 94.7 MHz with 23.5 kW @ 679’. It does an excellent job blanketing the center of the market. It’s licensed to Newark NJ.
Cumulus is in the market already with two heritage ABC Radio stations that it got via its acquisition of Citadel – iconic news-talker WABC-AM and Hot AC WPLJ-FM.
RBR-TVBR took a stab at guessing the price Cumulus will pay – we pegged the deal at about $50M. That guess was based on the fact that Merlin paid $22.5M for a similar Family Station FM in the somewhat smaller Philadelphia market.
David Schutz of Hoffman Schutz, who figures things like this out for a living, agreed to take a stab at it as well. “Based upon the recent sale of Merlin’s WRXP for $75 Million, I would expect WFME to fetch at least $55 Million,” he told RBR-TVBR.
The best guess may have come from Crain’s New York Business, which said an industry executive with knowledge of the deal pegged it at $40M.
If Crain is right, that would mean Cumulus got itself quite a deal. It certainly would be better than the RBR and Schutz guess, and in fact, that’s exactly what Crain thought as well.
Cumulus said it expects to close on the acquisition this year, which means we’ll be seeing documentation on this deal in the very near future. As soon as we know what the price is for sure, you will too!
